TF checkout and PowerShell
Calling “tf checkout” writes to the error stream if the file is checked out by any other user in any workspace. Powershell by default considers any error stream output as an error. Hence, checking out a file using TF from the PowerShell did not work well (The script had ‘ErrorActionPreference =”Stop”’).
Even though output was written to error stream by tf.exe, 0 was returned from the process (0 means everything is alright). Just because the tf.exe was writing to the error stream, PowerShell did not execute further code. It was necessary to continue further execution and ignore the error stream if the return value was 0.
With the help of “System.Diagnostics.Process”, we can get return value from process, error stream, and stdout stream as a variable.
Here is the code change:
$FileToBeCheckedOut = "abc.txt" # file path that needs to be checked out.
$TfExePath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\tf.exe"
Set-Alias -Name tf -Value $TfExePath
# if a user has checked out the file on other machine then we can continue to ignore those errors.
# Only non 0 return value should be considered as an error.
$pinfo = New-Object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo
$pinfo.FileName = $TfExePath
$pinfo.RedirectStandardError = $true
$pinfo.RedirectStandardOutput = $true
$pinfo.UseShellExecute = $false
#$pinfo.WorkingDirectory = $SourceDirectory
$CheckoutCommand = " checkout $FileToBeCheckedOut"
$pinfo.Arguments = $CheckoutCommand
$p = New-Object System.Diagnostics.Process
$p.StartInfo = $pinfo
$p.Start() | Out-Null
$p.WaitForExit()
$stdout = $p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd()
$stderr = $p.StandardError.ReadToEnd()
$ExitCode = $p.ExitCode
if($ExitCode -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "exit code: $ExitCode"
Write-Host "CheckoutCommand is $CheckoutCommand"
Write-Host "stdout: $stdout"
Write-Host "stderr: $stderr"
throw "An error occurred while checking out. Please look at stdout and stderr."
}